Atheist’s Favorite Bible Verse

Although I am an atheist, I do have a favorite Bible verse, not because it inspires me or gives me hope, but because it single-handedly discredits the entire Bible. Typically, I don’t seek out arguments with members of the church about god for the same reason that I don’t seek out arguments with insane asylum inmates about last night’s alien abduction. I am, however, in the business of teaching men to build their personal power, and on that topic, being tricked into giving your power away is bad enough, but being brainwashed into following the rules of an all-knowing, all-powerful moral dictator, who doesn’t even exist, well, that’s just ridiculously sad. So if my readers will forgive me for quoting the Bible for the next few paragraphs, please allow me to introduce you to god the liar…

“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:”

And now for my favorite verse, Genesis 2:17:

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

So what happens next? Eve eats the fruit, and does she die? Nope. Rather than dying, she finds Adam and gets him to eat the fruit also. How long after eating the fruit does Adam die? We are told that Adam lives to the ripe old age of 930 years old (Genesis 5:5), which in itself is ridiculousness. Logically, if god said Adam would surely die the same day he ate the fruit, and he lived to be 930 years old, this all-knowing and all-powerful god of the Bible is a liar… or possibly, the idiots who wrote the Bible were too stupid to catch the gaping plot hole in their story.

Of course religious zealots will claim that this was a metaphorical death, as if we’re not supposed to take the Bible literally, because if we did it reads like the memoirs of a deprived insane person (asking us to believe things like Adam living to be 930 years old).

Comments

The theist argument for this is, they did die, many years later, god never said “surely you would die right after eating it”. It really is not in the interest of the atheist to use the bible to refute the existence of god. I like to ask the theist, if their holy book suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, could they reconstruct it with the available evidence? Then explain to them that if every science book suddenly disappeared, could we reconstruct it? Yes, using the same evidence that was used to create them.

The answer I’ve seen to that is that they would have lived forever had they not eaten it. The slowly decreasing lifespans you see in the old testament are seen as ‘the fall’ gradually occurring. The Fall is also used to explain every bad thing to ever happen, but Christians struggle to explain why God’s plan went wrong so quickly, besides just repeating the words “free will” over and over.